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Category Archives: Finance

These ruts where I look ahead at where I want to be and I look down at where my feet seem to be glued to the ground and I can’t even fathom how long it is going to take to get to the other side of my goals.

I look around my cramped basement suite with stuff stacked everywhere and the clutter makes me want to vomit, but I’ve purged so much already – I do not know how much more I can actually get rid of. Simple truth is that I simply need more space. And a dishwasher. Because dear lord if this stack of dishes gets much higher…. I want a house. I don’t want a huge house, but I want a nice, clean house with a spacious closet and a guest room that can double as an office for me to work in. I want a large kitchen that I can cook in with an island for friends to gather around. I want a bathroom with double sinks and a soaker tub.

Realistically, I will never own a home in the greater Vancouver area. The requirements to get a mortgage are far outside of anywhere that I can hope to ever be. The down payment needs to be too high and my income needs to be higher. It won’t happen for me. The best I can hope for is to be able to afford the rent on a decent-ish townhouse, maybe 3 or 4 years down the road. At least maybe then I won’t be the 30-something mom living in the 20-something’s basement, paying off their mortgage for them.

I feel resentful that a woman who does not work (nor does she intend to) is being offered enough money to be able to maintain her home (a very nice home in a gated community, I might add) and yet she is willing to spend thousands of dollars on lawyer’s fees to try to get more. I would be so grateful to have the amount that she is being offered and to be able to stay home on top of it. I want that battle to end. So badly do I want it to end so that the kids involved (and the adults) can stop hurting and start healing, but it would seem that she doesn’t have the same goals.

I finish school literally tonight. And I don’t know what to do with it afterwards. The obvious answer is find a job with it, but I feel so overwhelmed by the process.

I look at my fitness goals and I feel so frustrated with the long slow road to get there. Each day goes by and I look at what I ate and I gross myself out. Why is it so hard for me to eat well? I go to boot camp and I leave feeling…. like I’ve lagged behind. I’m usually the last one to finish a set of anything and the slowest runner and the most red and the most sweaty. I go running on the trails and these people just lap me while I’m huffing and puffing along wishing it was as easy for me as it is for them. I’ve been running and exercising consistently for 6 months. I would have thought I’d have noticed something getting easier by now. Or some poundage to have come off (but that goes back to the eating thing).

And there are the bigger things that just make me want to throw my hands up in despair. The homophobia. The misogyny. The bullying. The lack of people willing to read a book. The remarkable pessimistic attitudes of people ALL AROUND ME. And it makes me want to give up. I know that this #YesAllWomen is not going to change the world. But I WANT it to. I don’t want my daughter growing up learning to scream fire instead of rape because fire will get a reaction. I don’t want her to grow up and, if her sexuality is anything other than straight, to be slandered and judged and treated as less than equal to her straight friends and family. I don’t want her to go through school with me having to look over her online life to make sure that she is safe and not being verbally slaughtered. But I don’t see solutions to these things short of throwing her over my shoulder and inventing our own life on a private island. A private island that would also be free because again, hello, money.

I’m tired, if that’s not apparent already. I’ve been going and going and going for the last year and I’m at the end of my tether and yet I feel like I’ve accomplished nothing for all of my time and effort. I’m no closer to a nice home. I’m no closer to my health goals and I’m further than ever from saving the world from itself.